Hi,

First of all, happy new year to you all!

From a ray-tracing point of view I had a productive start to the year. I created
two POV-Ray animations in the first few days. Each animation show the solution
of a burr puzzle in my collection. I created these animations for several
reasons. Firstly, these puzzles are beautiful and ingenuous but not very well
known. These animations will hopefully help others to discover these type of
puzzle. Secondly, these animations will help me in assembling and disassembling
the puzzles. It's more convenient than relying on my hand written solution.
Thirdly, it's fun to create them :-).

The first animation is online at YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgzFlt1aAug

It shows the solution of the "Mega Six" burr puzzle, arguably the most difficult
six piece burr puzzle. Out of this family, there is no puzzle with a unique
solution that requires more moves to free the first piece. Furthermore, the
puzzle has many false assemblies. This puzzle was found by Bill Cutler, using a
computer program to exhaustively analyze all possible burr puzzles.

From a technical/ray-tracing angle, there is not much to this animation. No
fancy techniques were needed, and visually it is quite basic. Nevertheless, I
did enjoy creating the animation using POV-Ray, as it enables you to
declaratively describe the solution sequence quite concisely. The code I used
looks as follows:

Move(<1, 6, 0>, y)
Move(<4, 0, 0>, x * 2)
Move(<2, 0, 0>, -y)
Move(<3, 4, 0>, -z)
.... etc

Here Move is a short custom macro. The first argument is a vector specifying
which piece(s) to move, and the second vector describes the direction and
distance.

The second animation I created is of a 18-piece burr puzzle called Condor's
Peeper designed by Jack Krijnen. This puzzle requires 62 moves to free the first
piece. The animation is not online yet. I have yet to render the hi-res version.
Furthermore, I am hoping I can get my brother to compose a custom soundtrack for
it, which I will then add before uploading.

Cheers,
Erwin

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